New Collected Poems Read online

  peeping, out of the tall grass, safe

  from the lurking snake; how she was one

  of us, here with us, who is now gone.

  THIRTY MORE YEARS

  When I was a young man,

  grown up at last, how large

  I seemed to myself! I was a tree,

  tall already, and what I had not

  yet reached, I would yet grow

  to reach. Now, thirty more years

  added on, I have reached much

  I did not expect, in a direction

  unexpected. I am growing downward,

  smaller, one among the grasses.

  THE WILD ROSE

  Sometimes hidden from me

  in daily custom and in trust,

  so that I live by you unaware

  as by the beating of my heart,

  suddenly you flare in my sight,

  a wild rose blooming at the edge

  of thicket, grace and light

  where yesterday was only shade,

  and once more I am blessed, choosing

  again what I chose before.

  THE BLUE ROBE

  How joyful to be together, alone

  as when we first were joined

  in our little house by the river

  long ago, except that now we know

  each other, as we did not then;

  and now instead of two stories fumbling

  to meet, we belong to one story

  that the two, joining, made. And now

  we touch each other with the tenderness

  of mortals, who know themselves:

  how joyful to feel the heart quake

  at the sight of a grandmother,

  old friend in the morning light,

  beautiful in her blue robe!

  THE VENUS OF BOTTICELLI

  I knew her when I saw her

  in the vision of Botticelli, riding

  shoreward out of the waves,

  and afterward she was in my mind

  as she had been before, but changed,

  so that if I saw her here, near

  nightfall, striding off the gleam

  of the Kentucky River as it darkened

  behind her, the willows touching

  her with little touches laid

  on breast and arm and thigh, I

  would rise as after a thousand

  years, as out of the dark grave,

  alight, shaken, to remember her.

  IN A MOTEL PARKING LOT, THINKING OF DR. WILLIAMS

  I

  The poem is important, but

  not more than the people

  whose survival it serves,

  one of the necessities, so they may

  speak what is true, and have

  the patience for beauty: the weighted

  grainfield, the shady street,

  the well-laid stone and the changing tree

  whose branches spread above.

  For want of songs and stories

  they have dug away the soil,

  paved over what is left,

  set up their perfunctory walls

  in tribute to no god,

  for the love of no man or woman,

  so that the good that was here

  cannot be called back

  except by long waiting, by great

  sorrow remembered and to come,

  by invoking the understones

  of the world, and the vivid air.

  II

  The poem is important,

  as the want of it

  proves. It is the stewardship

  of its own possibility,

  the past remembering itself

  in the presence of

  the present, the power learned

  and handed down to see

  what is present

  and what is not: the pavement

  laid down and walked over

  regardlessly—by exiles, here

  only because they are passing.

  Oh, remember the oaks that were

  here, the leaves, purple and brown,

  falling, the nuthatches walking

  headfirst down the trunks,

  crying “onc! onc!” in the brightness

  as they are doing now

  in the cemetery across the street

  where the past and the dead

  keep each other. To remember,

  to hear and remember, is to stop

  and walk on again

  to a livelier, surer measure.

  It is dangerous

  to remember the past only

  for its own sake, dangerous

  to deliver a message

  that you did not get.

  TO MY MOTHER

  I was your rebellious son,

  do you remember? Sometimes

  I wonder if you do remember,

  so complete has your forgiveness been.

  So complete has your forgiveness been

  I wonder sometimes if it did not

  precede my wrong, and I erred,

  safe found, within your love,

  prepared ahead of me, the way home,

  or my bed at night, so that almost

  I should forgive you, who perhaps

  foresaw the worst that I might do,

  and forgave before I could act,

  causing me to smile now, looking back,

  to see how paltry was my worst,

  compared to your forgiveness of it

  already given. And this, then,

  is the vision of that Heaven of which

  we have heard, where those who love

  each other have forgiven each other,

  where, for that, the leaves are green,

  the light a music in the air,

  and all is unentangled,

  and all is undismayed.

  PART TWO

  ON A THEME OF CHAUCER

  I never have denied

  What faith and scripture tell,

  That Heaven’s host is glad,

  Or that there’s pain in Hell.

  But what I haven’t tried

  I'll not put up for sale.

  No man has ever died

  And lived to tell the tale.

  THE REASSURER

  A people in the throes of national prosperity, who

  breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat

  poisoned food,

  who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons

  that they breathe, drink, and eat,

  such a people crave the further poison of official

  reassurance. It is not logical,

  but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore

  their President who tells them that all is well,

  all is better than ever.

  The President reassures the farmer and his wife who

  have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have

  exhausted themselves to pay for it,

  and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for

  the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the

  prosperity of corporations;

  he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their

  place of exile, because the poor land contained

  something required for the national prosperity,

  after all;

  he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a

  substance used in the normal course of national

  prosperity to make red apples redder;

  he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who

  sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of

  the floor of a mined-out stripmine;

  from his smile they understand that the fortunate have

  a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have

  a right to their misfortunes, and that these are

  equal rights.

  The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man

 
who has seen God, and found Him a true American,

  not overbearingly smart.

  The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the

  Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,

  who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if

  it came, would bring financial ruin;

  he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory

  and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who

  has been wakened in the night by a dream of the

  calamity of peace.

  LET US PLEDGE

  Let us pledge allegiance to the flag

  and to the national sacrifice areas

  for which it stands, garbage dumps

  and empty holes, sold out for a higher

  spire on the rich church, the safety

  of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood

  of the stock market. Let us feast

  today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us

  gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming

  the earth for our greater joy in Heaven,

  that fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever

  in the labyrinths of our self-esteem.

  Let us evolve forever toward the higher

  consciousness of the machine.

  The spool of our engine-driven fate

  unwinds, our history now outspeeding

  thought, and the heart is a beatable tool.

  THE VACATION

  Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

  He went flying down the river in his boat

  with his video camera to his eye, making

  a moving picture of the moving river

  upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

  toward the end of his vacation. He showed

  his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

  preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

  the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

  behind which he stood with his camera

  preserving his vacation even as he was having it

  so that after he had had it he would still

  have it. It would be there. With a flick

  of a switch, there it would be. But he

  would not be in it. He would never be in it.

  A LOVER’S SONG

  When I was young and lately wed

  And every fissionable head

  Of this super power or that

  Prepared the ultimate combat,

  Gambling against eternity

  To earn a timely victory

  And end all time to win a day,

  “Tomorrow let it end,” I’d pray,

  “If it must end, but not tonight.”

  And they were wrong and I was right;

  It’s love that keeps the world alive

  Beyond hate’s genius to contrive.

  ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANT HETEROSEXUAL MEN

  Come, dear brothers,

  let us cheerfully acknowledge

  that we are the last hope of the world,

  for we have no excuses,

  nobody to blame but ourselves.

  Who is going to sit at our feet

  and listen while we bewail

  our historical sufferings? Who

  will ever believe that we also

  have wept in the night

  with repressed longing to become

  our real selves? Who will

  stand forth and proclaim

  that we have virtues and talents

  peculiar to our category? Nobody,

  and that is good. For here we are

  at last with our real selves

  in the real world. Therefore,

  let us quiet our hearts, my brothers,

  and settle down for a change

  to picking up after ourselves

  and a few centuries of honest work.

  AIR

  This man, proud and young,

  turns homeward in the dark

  heaven, free of his burden

  of death by fire, of life in fear

  of death by fire, in the city

  now burning far below.

  This is a young man, proud;

  he sways upon the tall stalk

  of pride, alone, in control of the

  explosion by which he lives, one

  of the children we have taught

  to be amused by horror.

  This is a proud man, young

  in the work of death. Ahead of him

  wait those made rich by fire.

  Behind him, another child

  is burning; a divine man

  is hanging from a tree.

  THE MAD FARMER, FLYING THE FLAG OF ROUGH BRANCH, SECEDES FROM THE UNION

  From the union of power and money,

  from the union of power and secrecy,

  from the union of government and science,

  from the union of government and art,

  from the union of science and money,

  from the union of ambition and ignorance,

  from the union of genius and war,

  from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,

  the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

  There is only one of him, but he goes.

  He returns to the small country he calls home,

  his own nation small enough to walk across.

  He goes shadowy into the local woods,

  and brightly into the local meadows and croplands.

  He goes to the care of neighbors,

  he goes into the care of neighbors.

  He goes to the potluck supper, a dish

  from each house for the hunger of every house.

  He goes into the quiet of early mornings

  of days when he is not going anywhere.

  Calling his neighbors together into the sanctity

  of their lives separate and together

  in the one life of their commonwealth and home,

  in their own nation small enough for a story

  or song to travel across in an hour, he cries:

  Come all ye conservatives and liberals

  who want to conserve the good things and be free,

  come away from the merchants of big answers,

  whose hands are metalled with power;

  from the union of anywhere and everywhere

  by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price

  and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;

  from the union of work and debt, work and despair;

  from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.

  From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,

  secede into care for one another

  and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

  Come into the life of the body, the one body

  granted to you in all the history of time.

  Come into the body’s economy, its daily work,

  and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.

  Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows

  and acknowledges itself a living soul.

  Come into the dance of community, joined

  in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal

  love of women and men for one another

  and of neighbors and friends for one another.

  Always disappearing, always returning,

  calling his neighbors to return, to think again

  of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens

  and fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,

  calling them separately and together, calling and calling,

  he goes forever toward the long restful evening

  and the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

  PART THREE

  DUALITY

  So God created man in his

  own image, in the image of God

  created he him; male and female

/>   created he them.

  I

  To love is to suffer—did I

  know this when first

  I asked you for your love?

  I did not. And yet until

  I knew, I could not know what

  I asked, or gave. I gave

  a suffering that I took: yours

  and mine, mine when yours;

  and yours I have feared most.

  II

  What can bring us past

  this knowledge, so that you

  will never wish our life

  undone? For if ever you

  wish it so, then I must wish

  so too, and lovers yet unborn,

  whom we are reaching toward

  with love, will turn to this

  page, and find it blank.

  III

  I have feared to be unknown

  and to offend—I must speak,

  then, against the dread

  of speech. What if, hearing,

  you have no reply, and mind’s

  despair annul the body’s hope?

  Life in time may justify

  any conclusion, whenever

  our will is to conclude.

  IV

  Look at me now. Now,

  after all the years, look at me

  who have no beauty apart

  from what we two have made

  and been. Look at me

  with the look that anger

  and pain have taught you,

  the gaze in which nothing

  is guarded, nothing withheld.

  V

  You look at me, you give

  a light, which I bear and return,

  and we are held, and all

  our time is held, in this

  touching look—this touch

  that, pressed against the touch

  returning in the dark,

  is almost sight. We burn

  and see by our own light.

  VI

  Eyes looking into eyes looking

  into eyes, touches that see

  in the dark, remember Paradise,

  our true home. God’s image

  recalls us to Itself. We move

  with motion not our own,

  light upon light, day and

  night, sway as two trees

  in the same wind sway.